Searching for Caleb

3

Duncan took a tour of the Blue Bottle Antique Shop with Silas Amsel, the owner. Since he had already seen it when he applied for the job, he was not very interested. He ambled along behind fat, bearded Silas, yawning and drumming his fingers on passing tabletops. Spider-legged spinet desks, clocks with cherubs and shepherdesses and Father Time, dusty goblets, mirrors framed in knobby gold plaster, occasional tables too weak to bear the weight of a lamp — what was the sense in all this? To tell the truth, he had never thought about antiques before. He had been reared in a world where they were taken for granted. No one ever bought them, no one bought anything; the rooms were crowded with mellowed, well-kept furniture that appeared to have grown there, and whenever children departed they took several pieces with them but left the rooms as crowded as ever, somehow, as if more had sprouted in the night. No, what interested Duncan was the bin of contrivances he had found behind Silas’s counter: rusty cherry pitters, potato quillers, apple corers, fish scalers, an ingenious spiral cone for separating the white of an egg from the yolk. Beside the bin was a wicker valise that opened to make a chair for sitting by the seashore. Where had all that inventiveness got to, now? How had it faded away? The bin was marked with a felt-tip pen: Your choice, $1. The valise, which was broken, could be bought for $2.50, if anyone could find it among the boots and paper bags. When Duncan took over, he would put the valise in the front window. (He leered suddenly at Silas’s broad, ponderous back.) He would polish the utensils and lay them out in rows. He would sell everything humdrum and buy ancient tools at barn auctions and flea markets, until the shop resembled a nineteenth-century inventor’s workroom and he could sit inhaling a combination of machine oil and wood and oxidizing iron, his favorite smells.

“Oh, I’m getting old, getting old,” said Silas, creaking up the steps at the back of the store to show him where the telephone was. “Be sorry to let loose of the reins but glad of the rest, believe me.”

In fact Silas was a good thirty years younger than Grandfather Peck, who could have run the shop with one hand tied behind him, but Duncan was used to this premature aging among people outside the family. Besides, if Silas weren’t retiring Duncan would still be looking for a job. He had thought, this time, that he might finally have used up all his mother’s relatives. He had wondered if he would ever escape from the health food store, which he had turned into a paying proposition and then, out of boredom, allowed to run down again. Weevils took over the stone-ground wheat and mold got the soy grits and the unsulphured raisins turned to pebbles. He lost his natural gaiety and his recklessness, he fell back on bourbon, solitaire, and a flat-faced silence that not even Justine could penetrate. Was there anything worse than feeling you were sealed in a place, to grow old and stale and finally die? His careless bookkeeping and erratic hours, already a matter of principle, became so obvious no employer could overlook them. That was the pattern of Duncan’s life — ventures begun light-heartedly, with enthusiasm but only half his attention, the other half devoted to plans for a perpetual motion machine made entirely of screen door springs or a method of breeding stingless honeybees or the entering of a contest, sponsored by an Englishman, for a one-man flying machine no bigger than an armchair. In the last twenty years he had been, among other things, a goat farmer, a photographer, and a cabinetmaker; he had worked in a pet store, a tobacconist’s, a record bar, and a gourmet shop; he had taken census, shorn sheep, and fertilized the lawns of a suburban development on a toy tractor. Almost all these jobs had been enjoyable, but only briefly. He began to grow restless. He noticed that he was treading an endless round of days just as his pinched, unimaginative family had done before him. He would start going to work at ten and then eleven, four days a week and then three; and next came the bourbon, the solitaire, the silence in which to reflect upon the bars of his cage. Next another venture. He was his own perpetual motion machine.

Sometimes he worried about Justine. He didn’t want to be the way he was, uprooting her yearly or even more often, switching Meg to still another school. He knew how the neighbors shook their heads over him. Yet it seemed he suffered from some sort of chronic dissatisfaction which came and went like malaria, and the only way to hold it back was to learn more and more new facts, as if continually surprising his mind. Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs. He knew a Toggenburg goat from a Saanen, he could measure a dachshund, by sight alone, for a plaid mackintosh with matching Sherlock Holmes-style hat. He was an authority on the making of yogurt and the application of poisons to broad-leafed weeds during dandelion season. He had also discovered that every shop, even the most unlikely, has a circle of daily customers who become its experts — the elderly gentlemen capping each other’s list of imported cheeses, the ladies debating on the use of slippery elm bark, the teenagers intoning the life history of every member of every rock band. At the tobacconist’s, college boys could spend hours recalling the time a legendary freshman had found a fully aged and yellowed, hand-carved meerschaum pipe sitting on the top of someone’s garbage can. Perched on his stool behind the counter, gloating over the drawings for his pedal-driven flying machine, Duncan absorbed this stray knowledge like sunlight. Never mind that it was useless. And now he was about to find something else to learn, here among these ancient navigating devices and cracked foggy lanterns and ropes of amber beads like half-sucked butter rum balls.

“This is potassium lactate,” said Silas, tapping a brown bottle on the telephone table. “We use it to replace the acids in the covers of old leather books.”

And he looked surprised at the sudden light that flashed across Duncan’s face.

“Now this pad I always keep handy, and the pencil chained. People will call with items to sell, you want to get their addresses. Here, by the way, is a message for you.”

He ripped it off the pad. Habit-Forming Entertainments called, come to lunch first Sun. in Feb.

“What?” said Duncan.

“He said you would know him. He phoned four times in the last two days. He said if you couldn’t make it call back, he’s still listed as Exotico.”

“Ah,” said Duncan, and pocketed the slip. Silas waited but Duncan didn’t explain.

“Well, then,” Silas said finally, “if you can’t think of any questions — but I’ll be by, I’ll drop by often, of course.”

“Of course,” said Duncan, and he sighed, but Silas was groaning back down the steps by now and didn’t hear him.

Habit-Forming Entertainments, which had been Exotico, Inc., last year and Alonzo’s Amazing Amusements the year before that, was located in a cow pasture on the outskirts of Parvis, Maryland. It was a carnival company, of sorts — the kind that is called a forty-miler, although in this case the circuit was considerably wider. It traveled from one tiny town to another, supplying the entertainment for firehouse fairs, church and school bazaars, homecoming celebrations, and the gala openings of new shopping malls. In between trips the entire company lived in trailers in the cow pasture, with a pumpkin-colored tent flying pennants in the middle. They worked year round. Even in the dead of winter, Habit-Forming Entertainments would come trundling across the frost-bitten Maryland countryside to whoever asked for them. They brought mechanical rides, two ponies, a concession stand, a few simple games of chance whenever local law allowed, and five girls to run the games in satin bathing suits with dirty seams. There was also a merry-go-round. It was hard to transport and something was always going wrong with it, the mechanism sticking or the animals toppling over, but Justine preferred it to any other merry-go-round she had ever known. It played only one piece: “The St. James Infirmary Blues.” Whenever Justine heard that tune sawing through the air she had to climb on, she didn’t care if she was too old. She sat astride a laughing white horse, hugging the mane and laughing herself or occasionally crying, because the music was so tinny and sweet and sad and made her nostalgic for times before she was born. And whenever she saw Alonzo Divich, who owned that merry-go-round and all the other equipment, he was whistling “The St. James Infirmary Blues” like a theme song. He said it was the only tune he knew, too. He and the merry-go-round: two clumsy, hopeful, cheerful creatures, lumbering along where you would least expect to find them.

He was whistling when Justine and Duncan arrived; they tracked him down by his song. They left the car at the edge of the field and made their way across the frozen stubble toward the trailers, which sat around the tent in a cold, huddled circle like covered wagons braced for Indian attack. In the spring, when the countryside was blooming, this sort of life could seem pleasant, but not today. Today everything was lit with a sickly white winter sun, the inhabitants were shut inside their trailers, the ponies hung their heads. “Oh, the poor things!” Justine cried, and she felt the same when she passed an orange ride all folded on its truckbed like a crumpled baby dinosaur. But the whistling continued, happy as ever, sailing out from behind a plowshed, and when they had rounded the shed there was Alonzo Divich looking untouched by cold or loneliness or time. He was sitting on a boulder braiding rawhide — a large, dark man with a drooping black mustache and drooping eyes. He wore too many colors of clothing, all a little soiled, greasy, strained across the stomach and crotch and under the arms: a rose shirt, a woven Mexican vest, suede dungarees and crumpled boots. When he stood to hug them, he gave off a smell of leather and honey. “Aha!” he said to Justine. “But you haven’t changed at all! Even the hat is still the same! Is it rooted there?”

He had no accent — only a curious certainty to his speech. But where did he get his hybrid name, and his coloring, and his flashing gold molars and his habit of hugging other men so unself-consciously? Justine had asked him outright, once, what nationality he was. “You’re the fortune teller, you tell me,” he said.

“I read the future, not the past,” she told him.

“Well, the past should be easier!”

“It’s not. It’s far more complicated.”

But he had never told her, even so.

He led them to the tent, where folding chairs were grouped around long wheeled conference tables. This was the company’s communal hall, although in cold weather it was nearly empty. In one corner a blonde wearing slacks, gilt sandals, and several sweaters was combing out a miniature poodle. Two men in overalls were seated at a table drinking coffee from green mugs, but they left when Alonzo entered. “Aah, don’t go,” he said, flopping an arm toward their backs. He pulled out chairs at the center table, and seated himself at the head. Almost immediately a dark old lady appeared and spread a tablecloth. Then she brought a bottle and three small glasses, which she set before Alonzo. He filled the glasses exactly to the brim. The old lady reappeared with paper plates, plastic forks, and then trays of rice, hunks of meat in tomato sauce, eggplant, chicken dusted with some peculiar red powder, wrinkled black olives, bowls of beet soup and chopped cucumber in yogurt, great flat disks of bread and pitchers of green Kool-Aid. Steam rose from the platters, and from Alonzo’s mouth as he talked in the cold, rubbery-smelling air. “Take some, don’t be shy. First Duncan, he’s thinner than ever. He’s stretching out tall and thin like a dandelion. How tall are you, Duncan?”

“Six two.”

“Double rice for Duncan, Nana!”

The old lady shoveled a mountain onto Duncan’s plate.

“Rice prevents heart attacks, stroke, and impotence,” said Alonzo.

“It’s the thiamine,” said Duncan.

“More slivovitz?”

“Oh, I might as well.”

Justine ate everything she was given and accepted seconds and thirds, egged on by the approving eye of the old lady who stood behind Alonzo’s chair with her hands folded under her apron. Alonzo and Duncan mainly drank, though Alonzo outdistanced Duncan very early and even managed to work in a few slabs of bread stuffed with meat and rice, meanwhile talking steadily. “When I heard you were moving back to Maryland I thought, well then, I can wait. I was contemplating a certain action. But we’ll go into that later. I had been thinking, now how will I reach Justine? Then I got your card. It came as a great relief to me.”

He leaned back and laced his hands across his stomach, his face a buttery color in the light of the tent. Alonzo was a happy man but forever complaining, as if hoping to fool any jealous gods. Although he loved his carnival business he said that only a fool would stick with it. “Imagine,” he always said, “some people suppose this life to be romantic, dancing around the wagons at night. If they were only in my boots! You need to be a mechanic, a lawyer, an accountant. It’s all the assembling and disassembling of machinery, and repairs and insurance payments. I’m being robbed by my insurance agency. Disability and liability and major medical and fire and theft and acts of God. Then there is the social security, a headache in itself when you consider all these employees coming and going and the pregnancies and the girls deciding to finish school. And you have to negotiate in every town, some don’t allow so much as a ring-the-bottle game, and there’s the safety inspectors and the police and the church that wants to put a tray of cupcakes in your hot dog stand . . . ”

It was Duncan he talked to; men were best for discussing business. But it was Justine he took away with him at the end of the meal, one large warm thumb and forefinger gripping her upper arm. “May I?” he asked Duncan. “Only long enough to say when I’ll become a millionaire.”

Duncan said, “Do you still have your mechanic?”

“Lem? Would I be here if I didn’t? He’s in the purple trailer. He knew you were coming; go right in.”

Alonzo walked with his head down, still holding Justine’s arm. “You must excuse the state of my place,” he said. “I have too many people in it now. My wife has left me but one of her children stayed behind to keep me company. And also Bobby. You’ve met Bobby, my stepson. Actually my fourth wife’s stepson, her ex-husband’s boy by a woman from Tampa, Florida. Would you care for Turkish coffee?”

“No, thank you,” said Justine, and she stepped inside the little green trailer. Although it was crowded it was neater than her own house, with pots and pans arranged in rows in the tiny kitchen and account books stacked at one end of the corduroy daybed. There was a coffee table that had a stripped look, as if he had just recently cleared it. He smoothed it now with both hands. “For the cards,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Justine.

She sat down on the daybed. She removed her crumb-littered coat, although even here it was cold. From her carry-all she took the cards in their square of silk.

“Where did you get the silk?” Alonzo asked. (He always did.)

“They came with the cards,” she said, unwrapping them. She shuffled them several times, looking off at the blue air outside the trailer window.

“And where did you get the cards?”

“Cut the deck, please.”

He cut it. He sat down across from her and looked at her soberly from under curled black brows, as if his future might be read in her face.

Justine first met Alonzo Divich at a church bazaar in 1956, when she was telling fortunes in the Sunday school basement. She was with the white elephants and the potted plants; his carnival was outside. He came in to have his cards read. He was one of those people, she saw, who are addicted to outguessing their futures. Whenever he had an hour to kill, a layover in some town or a lull in his work, he would search out the local seeress. If there were five local seeresses, fine. He would go to all five. He would listen without even breathing. He had heard his fortune, he told Justine, from well over a thousand women, and it had not once been done right. He had not only had his cards read but also his palms, his skull, his moles, his fingernails, his dreams, his handwriting, his tea leaves and coffee grounds. He had been to astrologers and physiognomists, not to mention specialists in bibliomancy, clidomancy, crystal-gazing, and ouija boards. A lady in Montgomery County had set a gamecock to pick corn from a circle of letters; a Georgia woman studied smoke rising from a fire and another dropped melted wax into cold water, forming small nubbly objects that she claimed to be able to interpret. In York County, Pennsylvania, he had had to bake his own barley cakes, which were then broken open and examined under a magnifying glass. And in a marsh near St. Elmo, Alabama, a very old woman had offered to kill a rice rat and study its entrails, but he had felt that such an act might bring bad luck.

He had told Justine all this at once, leaning toward her across the table in her curtained booth while a line of church ladies waited their turns outside. Justine, although she did not know it, wore the tolerant, disillusioned expression of a doctor hearing that his new patient has been to forty other doctors before him, none of them satisfactory. It gave her a look of wisdom. Alonzo decided she was going to turn out to be special. “Lady,” he had said, setting his palms on her table, “tell me the answer to my problem. I feel you can.”

“What is your problem?”

“Don’t you know?”

“How should I?”

“You’re the fortune teller.”

So Justine had to give the speech she had made more often than she could count, and would make many times again, sometimes even to him. “Now I am not a mind reader,” she said, “and I have no way at all of guessing what you want to ask, or where you come from or anything else about your past. I read the future. I have a talent for predicting change. If you help me we can search for an answer together; but I’m not going to outwit you.”

“My problem is this,” Alonzo said instantly.

And he sat on a Sunday school chair and took his hat off — a sudden, changeable man, all black and bright and multicolored like a fire that could leap in any direction at any second. “My name is Alonzo Divich,” he told her. “I own a carnival business.” He jabbed a thumb at the merry-go-round music above them, “The St. James Infirmary Blues” spinning itself out among the cries of children and hot dog vendors, and teenagers clinging to the Tilt-A-Whirl. “I’m divorced, I have this kid. Now I’ve met a rich widow woman who wants to marry me. She likes the kid, too. She would even live in the trailer. I don’t have to change one thing in my life for her. And I’m a marrying fool. I love being married, I tried it twice before. So what’s the trouble? The same day we start the talk about a wedding, exact same day, a man I used to know calls and asks me to come and prospect for gold with him beside a lake in Michigan. He says he’s onto something. He’s going to be a wealthy man, and so am I. But of course there’s the kid, and the mortgaged machines, and the woman who doesn’t like Michigan. So which do I do?”

Justine was listening with her mouth open. When he finished she said, immediately, “Go look for gold.”

“Huh? What about the cards?”

“Oh, the cards,” she said.

So she let him cut them and she laid them down, her beautiful cards as limp and greasy as her baby’s oilcloth picture books. She chose the simplest formation she knew. She pointed out the meaning while he hung over the table, not breathing: a happy journey, reunion with a friend, a pleasant surprise, and no possibility of money.

“Aha,” he said and she raised her face. “So it’s lucky I ran into you. No money!”

“Mr.—”

“Divich. Just call me Alonzo.”

“Alonzo, is the money all you’re going for?”

“Well, but—”

“Go anyway! Go on! Don’t just sit around hemming and hawing!”

Then she slapped his money back on his palm, for lack of any better way to show how she felt. And she gathered up her cards without looking at him even though he sat there a minute longer, waiting.

It was four years before she saw Alonzo again. On Independence Day, 1960, she set up a booth at a picnic in Wamburton, Maryland. Nobody there seemed much interested in the future. Finally she repacked her cards and took a walk toward the courthouse, where rides were spinning and balloons were sailing and the merry-go-round was playing “The St. James Infirmary Blues,” sending out little shimmering catgut strings that drew her in. She started toward the wooden horses. And there beside the tallest horse was — why, Alonzo Divich! — wiping his face on a red bandanna and quarreling with a mechanic. Only when she came up he turned and stopped in mid-sentence and stared. “You!” he said. He ringed her wrist with his hand and pulled her away, toward a bench where the music was not so loud. She came, holding onto her hat. “Do you know how long I worked to find you?” he shouted.

“Who, me?”

“How often do you move? Are you some sort of forty-miler all your own? First I asked at the church, who was the fortune teller? ‘Oh, Justine,’ they said. Everyone knew you, but they didn’t know where you lived. And by the time I found that out you had moved but left no forwarding address. Why? Did you owe money? Never mind. I haunted all your ladyfriends, I hoped you were a letter writer. But you are not. Then at the tobacconist’s where your husband used to work they said—”

“But what did you want me for?” Justine asked.

“To tell my fortune, of course.”

“I told your fortune.”

“Yes, back in nineteen fifty-six. Do you think my life is so steady? Now that reading has no bearing at all.”

“Oh. Well, no,” said Justine, who saw that with him, that would certainly be true. She reached into her bag — at that time a leather pouch gouged by her neighbor’s puppy — and pulled out the cards. “And you didn’t go look for gold,” she said.

“You do read the past!”

“Don’t be silly. Here you are in Maryland; it’s obvious to anyone.”

“I didn’t, no. I thought about it. Instinct said to follow your advice, but I held back. You know the rest.”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. I married the widow,” he said, “who turned out to be a disappointment. She had no money after all, the kid got on her nerves, what she had wanted all along was to start us a troupe of belly dancers with her as the star. Belly dancers, when half the towns make our game girls wear sweatshirts! I said absolutely not. She left me. I haven’t heard from my friend in Michigan but I expect he has a whole sack of gold nuggets by now and meanwhile here I sit, where I was to begin with, only I happen to be married again — oh, you were right! If I had listened to you, think where I might be today!”

“Cut the cards,” Justine told him.

“My new wife is pregnant and I have too many kids already,” said Alonzo. “She is morning-sick, afternoon-sick, and evening-sick. When I walk into the trailer she throws fruits and vegetables at me. I don’t think we are getting along at all. However, that’s not my problem, no . . . ”

But what his problem had been Justine couldn’t even remember now. There were so many years in between, so many different formations laid out for him on park benches, tent floors, and trailer furniture. Once he found her he never again lost track of her. He supplied her with change-of-address cards already stamped and filled out, with blanks left for the old address and the new. He adopted her entire family, unfolding for Duncan the mysteries of his diesel engines and his cotton candy machines and the odds on his games of chance, bringing Meg gaudy circus prizes for as long as she was a child, treating the baffled grandfather with elaborate old-world respect and sending Justine a great moldy Smithfield ham every Christmas. He would drive halfway across the state just to ask her a single question, and then overpay her ridiculously when she answered. He mourned her moves to Virginia and Pennsylvania and rejoiced when she was safely back in Maryland. He beat on her front door at unexpected times and when she was not home he threatened to fall apart. “I have to know!” he would cry to Duncan or Meg. “I can’t make a move, I am utterly dependent on her!”

Yet the peculiar thing (which Justine had seen too often before to wonder at) was that he very seldom took her advice. Look at all his marriages: seven, at last count. Maybe more. And how many of those had Justine approved? None. He had gone ahead anyway. Later he would come back: “Oh, you were right. I never should have done it. When will I learn?” His wives tended to leave him, taking the children along. Then sooner or later the children drifted back, and there were always a few living in his trailer — sons and stepsons and others whose relationship was not quite clear, even to him. “My wives are gone and I sleep alone but still I have three kids at me night and day, all ages. Next time I will listen to every word you say, I’ll follow it to the letter,” he said.

He said it now, nearly seventeen years from the day he had first ignored her advice, while Justine laid out the cards on the coffee table in the trailer. “I’m going to do everything you tell me to this time,” he said.

“Ha,” she said.

She bent closer and peered at the cards. “Money and a jealous woman. You’re not getting married again.”

“No, no.” He sighed and stroked his mustache. “Who would marry me? I’m growing old, Justine.”

For a second she thought she had heard wrong.

“I’m fifty-two,” he said. “Do your cards tell you that?”

It was the only fact he had ever handed her. For some reason it diminished him. Alonzo, possessing an age? When she first met him, then, he would have been thirty-five — a young, unsteady number of years for a man, but Alonzo had never been young or unsteady. She raised her eyes and found a sprinkling of white in his hair, and deep grooves extending the droop of his mustache. When he smiled at her, creases rayed out from the corners of his eyes. “Why, Alonzo,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Why—”

But she couldn’t think what she was trying to say. And Alonzo shot his cuffs impatiently and sat forward on his stool. “Well, never mind that,” he said. “Get on with my problem.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“Shall I sell the business to Mrs. Harry Mosely?”

“Who’s Mrs. Harry Mosely?”

“What does it matter? A rich lady in Parvis, divorced, wants some kind of business different from all her friends.”

“The jealous woman.”

“Not of me.”

“Envious jealous.”

“She wears jodhpurs,” Alonzo said, and shook his head. Justine waited.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, what?”

“Do I sell or do I not? I’m asking.”

“But you haven’t said what the choice is,” Justine told him. “What are you selling it for? Are you joining another gold rush?”

“No, I thought just something quiet. I have a friend who’s in merchandising, he would find me something or other.”

“Merchandising?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m going to have to study these cards a bit,” Justine said, and she bent over them again and rested her forehead on her hand.

“This life is hard, Justine,” Alonzo told her. “That tent out there cost five thousand dollars and has a life span of only six years. I pay very high taxes on this pasture but Maryland has gypsy laws so we have to live here, it’s too expensive to camp around. And occasionally people fail to pay me or the weather keeps the customers away, and a ride rusts to bits at exactly the time I clear the mortgage on it. I have so many people to be responsible for. Also these kids all the time. Can’t you understand?”

“Yes, yes,”

“Then why are you studying the cards for so long?”

“Because I don’t know what to say,” she said, and she laid an index finger on the six of hearts and thought a moment. “I see the woman and the money, but everything else is indecisive. No sudden fortune and no disasters. A few petty reverses, a friendship breaking off, but otherwise just — weak.”

“Weak?” said Alonzo.

She looked directly at him. “Alonzo,” she said. “Don’t sell your business.”

She left it up to him to decide whether it was she or the cards who spoke.

In the late afternoon, when the sun grew warmer, they sat outside on a collapsed sofa and watched two of Alonzo’s teenaged boys pitching a baseball back and forth in the long grass behind the trailers. A girl was hanging out diapers, and a man was rotating the tires on his Studebaker. In the field beyond the baseball players, Duncan and Lem were fiddling with a hunk of machinery. Really it was time they started back, but Duncan said this machine was something special. He wanted to invent a ride for it to run. And the sun was warming the top of Justine’s head right through her hat, and the dexterous twist of the baseball glove as it rose to meet the ball and the slap of leather on leather lulled her into a trance.

“If I were president, I would not have a personal physician in the White House with me but you, Justine,” said Alonzo. “You could read the cards for me every morning before the Cabinet meeting.”

She smiled and let her head tip against the back of the sofa.

“Till then, you can join my carnival. Why do you always say no? Coralette, who works the concession stand, she just takes her husband and kids along. They stay in the trailer and read comic books.”

“Duncan doesn’t like comic books,” Justine said.

Out in the field, Duncan raised a sprocket wheel in one gaunt, blackened hand and waved it at her.

“And Meg, she’s all grown up? She doesn’t come on visits with you now?”

“She doesn’t come anywhere with us,” Justine said sadly. “She studies a lot. She works very hard. She’s very conscientious. Other girls wear blue jeans but Meg sews herself these shirtwaist dresses and polishes her shoes every Sunday night and washes her hair every Monday and Thursday. I don’t think she approves of us. To tell the truth, Alonzo, I don’t believe she thinks much of carnivals either or fortune telling or moving around the way we do. Not that she says so. She’s very good about it, really, she’s so quiet and she does whatever we tell her to. It kills me to see her bend her head the way she sometimes does.”

“Girls are difficult,” Alonzo said. “Fortunately I never had many of them.”

“I think she’s in love with a minister.”

“With a what?”

“Well, an assistant minister, actually.”

“But even so,” said Alonzo.

“She went to his church in Semple. She’s religious, too. Did I mention that? She went to his young people’s group on Sunday evenings. Then they started going out together to lectures and debates and educational slide shows — oh, very proper, but she’s only seventeen! And she brought him to our house so we could meet him. It was terrible. We all sat in the living room. Duncan says she has a right to choose whoever she wants but he doesn’t think she chose this man, she just accepted him. Like a compromise. What else could it be, with a man so meek and puny? He’s one of those people with white shiny skin and five o’clock shadow. Duncan says—”

“But after all,” said Alonzo, “better that than a motordrome rider. My first wife’s girl married a motordrome rider.”

“I would prefer a motordrome rider any day,” Justine said. Then she sighed. “Oh well, I suppose nobody likes who their children go out with.”

“It’s true.”

“When I was courting, my father locked me in my room one time.”

“Oh?” said Alonzo. He squinted, following the arc of the baseball floating across the sun.

“I fell in love with my first cousin.”

“Oh-ho.”

“On top of that, my shiftless first cousin. He drank and ran around. For years he had a girlfriend named Glorietta, who always wore red. My aunts and my mother would whisper whenever they mentioned her, even her name. Glorietta de Merino.”

“Ah, Glorietta,” said Alonzo, and settled back with his face tilted to the sky and his boots stretched out in front of him. “Go on.”

“He made terrible grades all through school and dropped out the first year of college. Nobody could ever find him when they wanted him. While I! I was an only child. I tried to be as good as possible. Would you believe, until I was twenty years old I had never tasted liverwurst?”

“Liverwurst,” said Alonzo, turning it over lazily.

“Because my family didn’t happen to eat it. Not that there was anything wrong with it, of course, they just weren’t in the habit of ordering it from the market. I didn’t know there was such a thing as liverwurst! The first time I tasted it I ate a whole pound. But that was later. First I fell in love with my cousin, and went on trips with him and rode in his unsafe car and had to be locked in my room. Then I discovered liverwurst.”

“But what became of him?” Alonzo asked.

“Who?”

“The first cousin.”

“Oh,” said Justine. “Why, I married him. Who did you think I was talking about?”

“Duncan?”

“Of course Duncan,” said Justine, and she sat up again and shaded her eyes. “Cousin Duncan the Bad,” she said, and laughed, and even Alonzo, drowsy and heavy in the sun, had to see how happy she looked when she located Duncan’s spiky gold head glinting above the weeds.